I even thought, well, at least Alexi, our daughter, was an undergraduate, so she and Leah couldn’t really be considered the same age. What a hideous witch I’d become! And yet, what fun. No wonder this shit was what men did all the time. Although most of the men I knew who had gone this route seemed to have been in positions of greater power than I felt I was in, somehow. Was I an old man? A powerful professor of poetry taking advantage of my vulnerable student? It didn’t feel that way. Slipping down an existential cliff, I began to make small, repetitive circles on Leah’s hip. Leah, the redhead whose poems and papers, although unexceptional, had made my stomach lurch.
Leah was laughing, and I was glad. I told myself that this was fun for her, fun in the way things are fun when you’re young and have no sense of consequences. She turned the water back on with a sleek foot, and a jet of heat spread up my calves. I closed my eyes and rested my head on an inflatable neck pillow secured to the tub’s back ledge.
How much time did Leah spend bathing? She was the one who’d suggested getting in, so maybe she diligently read my assignments while half-submerged: Beowulf with lavender sea salts, Thomas Hardy as the water turned gray, Elizabeth Bishop while Leah loofa-ed. Now she leaned even more fully back into me, letting her knees fall against the sides of the tub. Her red hair, although short, haloed out in the water, suddenly less spiky. I wondered what she put in it, how she combed it to make it look so prickly when dry. Now it had become soft strands.
I moved my hand from her stomach up first, onto the landscape of her breasts, trailing bubbles over her nipples, then moving my fingers down under the water to her rib cage and stomach, flat and hard. And even so, the next image arrived in my mind: a set of stacking bath dolls I once bought for Alexi, rubber renditions of Russian nesting dolls, but with hair—who thought that was a good idea for a bath toy? Water remained between them no matter how long they dried or how vigorously I scrubbed, so mold grew all over them like disfiguring birthmarks or cancers.
I said, “Leah,” out loud, reality trumping the mottled dolls momentarily.
“Yeah?”
I had nothing. The next image was me, dead, Charles and the forensics team finding my blue body here in the tub, bloated as a carnival doll. The dead star of a show I wouldn’t be willing to watch.
“Sam?” she asked.
Um. Sam? I got that I couldn’t really expect her to call me Professor Baxter in this context, but I would have preferred Samantha at least, as if those two additional syllables could help correct for some of this.
“Hello? You okay?”
“I’m fine, Leah. I was just making sure you’re still here.” I liked her name, Leah. It reminded me of Star Wars, something quirky and sci-fi, otherworldly. Like her.
I GATHERED MORE bubbles from the surface of the water and rubbed them into the slight dip of Leah’s hip bone, felt them disappear, felt the jut of her hips for as long as I could stand not to move my fingers down, slowly. As I traced the shape of her, sliding my fingers between her open legs, a bunch of disconnected nouns surged back: first, the sidewalk we’d just walked down on University Street came at me—pavement squares, a parking meter, wheels, the curb rolling like punctuation. Parentheses. Leah’s skin. All outside matter was merging dangerously with inside.
Leah was rubbery, the warm water dissolving whatever was left of my clear thinking, early boundaries. She moved like a mermaid, wiggling against me. I was counting, holding my breath, whatever used to be selective about my permeability vanishing. I was borderless, without outlines, and therefore no longer myself. Convenient, because then I could keep moving my fingers, feeling the steam rise around us as Leah slid around and the tub filled.
The bubbles rose above its edge and oozed over, onto Leah’s (face it, Sam), angry-emoji-shaped bathmat. The nouns came back, and I had the sense I’d often had lately—that I was literally asleep, dreaming atop our green sheets, a set sent by Charles’s mother, geraniums blooming across them. That I might wake up any moment with his arm draped over me, or his foot tangled around my ankle.
Even as I tried to focus on Leah’s sea creature-y signals, I thought of sheets Charles and I had shared, how for nineteen years I’d washed and stretched the sets out again and again over the tight corners of a series of mattresses that seemed suddenly like an ill-conceived art installation. What if I lined up every mattress we’d ever slept on? I could bounce from bed to bed and maybe make it across the entire planet.
“Don’t stop,” Leah whispered, arching her back and pressing into my hand, moving harder against it. I didn’t increase the pressure of my fingers, just kept a soft, consistent movement inside and outside of her, letting Leah move against me until she made a cricket sound in the back of her throat, a chirping signal of pleasure almost painful. Then she relaxed into the water, laughing. “Okay, now you can stop.”
That sound! My life dissolved like an old-fashioned slideshow catching fire. Each image melted and curled: Charles’s hands, knotted, arms tight and sinewy, cradling his head on a pillow. He’d slept like that when we were young, holding his own face as if it were a baby, and then later—after we’d lived in two cities and three apartments—holding one of my arms, as though he’d exchanged his head for it. From there, the slope was dangerous; he began to fall asleep with any part of himself wrapped around or holding or lying directly on part of me: an arm, leg, foot, shoulder on my shoulder, sometimes even his head on my chest. It was a weight and tangle I thought kept me awake, except I must have fallen asleep each night, because I’d wake later having glided out from under Charles into my own cool space.
Here were Charles’s size thirteen feet. Here, the fallen tree shapes his legs made under the quilt. Here, his chest rising, falling, breathing. Here was Alexi, toddling up the first porch step, a clean diaper on her head like a little barrister wig. My mother, coming out of the door of her house onto the porch, clapping.
And in the treacherous eye of my mind, here was Alexi again, this time in a cap and gown, grinning sideways at her best friend, Siobhan, ignoring my camera. Alexi, with the tattoo high on her collarbone, a tiny lightning bolt that signified some secret between her and Siobhan, one she never revealed to me, and which I could hardly hold against her now, no matter what it was. Alexi never looked directly into a camera, but always sideways—always away from whoever wanted to capture her, maybe especially me. Or maybe she was like me, cagey, fast, distractible. Here—kill me—was Charles’s mother, visible from across a stretch of golf-able lawn, raising the pale drink in her hand up to meet her angry mouth.
Leah turned over and flattened herself on top of me. She looked down as if deciding something, then put a hand on my stomach before climbing out of the tub, careful not to crush me. She stepped onto a damp pile of clothes on the floor: her jeans and belt, a black tank top, infinitesimally small and complicated underpants.
“You want a cheese sandwich?”
In order to have wanted a cheese sandwich less, I would have had to be dead already. I imagined cutting a sandwich in half for Alexi, the insides oozing out. I imagined knives. How do doctors get knives under human skin? Do they peel the skin back and then scrape the tissue out? Does skin peel away in a pure sheet? Doesn’t it tear? Scrunch up? Bleed? What happens to the blood? Do they suck it away with one of those loud tubes like water from the back of my open mouth at the dentist?
I didn’t move or speak. The water was cooling creepily.
“Stay there,” Leah said. “I’ll bring it. I don’t want you to go hungry at my house.”
I imagined a sandwich floating in the bath with me. Leah dropped the towel to the floor and walked naked out of the room. My